TITLE: Loneliness of the Unwanted
NAME: Ron Gow
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rgow@calweb.com
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lotu_rg.jpg
RENDERER USED:
Bryce 5
TOOLS USED:
Bryce 5, HamaPatch, Lsystem4
Paintshop Pro 7 used for textures and to add signature and convert to .jpg
RENDER TIME:
5 hr, 37min
HARDWARE USED:
Pentium IV 1.8gz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
When I first saw the topic I immediately thought of the Beatles song "Eleanor
Rigby". I was caught by the line "Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was
buried along with her name". I kept seeing a headstone with no name on it, but
couldn't think of what to do with it. However, when I saw the article in the
paper the next morning about a newborn baby found in a trash dumpster, and
realized it.was the third one in three weeks, I knew I had my topic for this
round. I could think of nothing lonelier than being born to be abandoned.
Never loved, not even named. Unwanted. Thrown away. That's loneliness.
Hence center stage for Baby Doe.
For the rest of us, loneliness usually stems from loss or absence. Behind Baby
Doe I represent several types of loss:
1. Loss of a parent. A loss we all share, yet completely different for each of
us. In memory of my father Merle, and dedicated to all the rest of my family.
2. Loss of a spouse. Losing the person you've devoted your life to leaves a
yawning chasm in the heart. In memory of Elizabeth Renner, dedicated to her
husband Alan and daughter Renee.
3. Loss of a child. The loss that should never happen, the passing of a child
before their parent. In memory of Mark Blair, and dedicated to his mother
Roberta.
4. Collective loss. When senseless violence shatters lives and families around
the world. In memory of September 11, 2001, and dedicated to all the
survivors.
And the hidden guest: (Not visible, behind the fence (which has no gate)),
representing the loneliness of self exile, a reclusive millionaire with the
intials H.H.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
WHEW! This was by far the largest scene I have ever attempted 488 objects -
4.38 million polygons . If nothing else, I learned a lot about working with
large files.
I already knew I wanted the closeup of the headstone in the foreground, and that
meant GRASS, which I didn't have a good way to do at the time. I had been
using a hi-res heightfield made of 3000 spikes, but it didn't look good up
close, and was only good for little patches since the polygon count was
ridiculously high.
I also had wandered around the local cemetery looking at stones, but realized
the stones were the easy part... cemeteries are seriously full of plants!
So I spent the next 3 days fiddling with Tim Perz's excellent Lsystem4 until I
had several vines, ferns, and weeds I was happy with, and in the process
accidentally came up with a long thin polygon shape that looked suspiciously
like a blade of grass. A few more hours of fiddling and EUREKA! - I had got it
to make nice versatile patches of lovely grass that had only about a 20th of
the polygons (YES! - OH JOY OH BLISS - I FINALLY GOT GRASS!!! I was so
thrilled I almost named the picture "grass".)
Each major part of the picture was done first as a separate scene. I had a
scene for each stone, and one for the stonewall, and one for the fence.
The stones are all either modeled in HamaPatch or Bryce or are a combination of
both. The plaques and lettering are CSG using Bryce symetrical lattices. The
fence and wall are CSG. The long bladed plants and the ivy on the wall were
done in Hamapatch. All vines, bushes, ferns and The Grass were done in
Lsystem4. The background trees are a mix of Bryce and Lsystem4. (The Bryce
trees are nice looking, but the Lsystem trees are more natural in my opinion.
Mixing them gives me a nice natural looking variety pak)
Materials are either Bryce procedural textures or my own maps created in PSP7.
Once I had each part looking like I wanted, I merged them all together into the
final scene and started to work on lighting. After several variations I didn't
like, I tried a render with volumetric lighting and it looked much more
natural, but made the picture a lot brighter and played havoc with several of
my plant textures. I spent about a week tweaking my textures to get them all
to blend again, and dropping the ambience levels to decrease the brightness and
finally get the final version that's here. I think it looks pretty natural for
an outdoor scene.
No source file, its 193 meg.